Low-income countries are struggling to protect themselves against climate change, officials and experts have told the BBC.

Organisations representing 90 countries say that their plans to prevent damage have already been outpaced by climate-induced disasters, which are intensifying and happening more regularly.

The UN says the number of developing countries with climate adaptation plans has increased. But it stresses that there’s limited evidence these plans have reduced any risks.

“We need to adapt our plans to the worsening climate crisis. Our existing plans are not enough to protect our people,” says Sonam Wangdi, chair of the UN’s Least Developed Countries (LDC) Group on climate change.

Their call for action comes as the UN’s climate science body prepares to publish its latest assessment on Monday about the state of global warming.

The report, compiled by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, will provide a scientific assessment of current and future climate change, and be a key reference for policymakers at the UN climate summit in Glasgow this November.

The world has already warmed by about 1.2C since the industrial era began, and temperatures will keep rising unless governments around the world make steep cuts to emissions.

Last year, the Caribbean had a record-breaking 30 tropical storms – including six major hurricanes. The World Meteorological Organisation says the region is still recovering.

On islands like Antigua and Barbuda, experts say that many buildings have been unable to withstand the intense winds these storms have brought.

“We used to see category four hurricanes, so that’s what we have prepared for with our adaptation plans, but now we are being hit by category five hurricanes,” says Diann Black Layner, chief climate negotiator for the Alliance of Small Island States.

“Category five hurricanes bring winds as strong as 180 miles per hour which the roofs cannot withstand because it creates stronger pressure inside our houses,” she said.

Several Pacific Island countries were hit by three cyclones between the middle of 2020 and January 2021.

“After those three cyclones, communities in the northern part of our country have seen the sea walls built as part of their adaptation plans crumbling,” says Vani Catanasiga, head of the Fiji Council of Social Services – a group representing Fijian NGOs in the country’s Disaster Management Council.

“The water and the wind repeatedly battering the settlements even displaced some locals.”

Although it’s rare to see so many storms in such a short space of time, experts say sea storms have been growing in strength.

Studies suggest tropical cyclones have become more intense in the past 40 years, but an increase in the overall number of cyclones has not been established.

In Uganda, communities in the Rwenzori region have been trying to protect themselves from landslides and floods by digging trenches and planting trees, helping to prevent soil erosion.

But it has not always been a success.

“The rains have become so intense that we have seen huge, sudden floods sweeping away these defences,” said Jackson Muhindo, a local climate change and resilience coordinator for Oxfam.

“As a result, there have been multiple landslides on mountain slopes which have buried settlements and farms,” he adds. “Adaptation works based on soil conservation are proving to be increasingly useless in the wake of these extreme weather events.”

The UN Framework Convention on Climate Change says more than 80% of developing countries have begun formulating and implementing their national adaptation plans.

But a study by the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED), published last month, suggests that the 46 of the world’s least-developed countries don’t have the financial means to “climate proof” themselves.

The IIED says these countries need at least $40bn (£28.8bn; €33.8bn) a year for their adaptation plans. But between 2014-18, just $5.9 billion of adaptation finance was received.

Under the UN climate convention, the EU and 23 developed countries have pledged to make $100bn available every year to fund climate-related projects in developing nations – like schemes to cut emissions, and adaptations to mitigate damage caused by weather-induced disasters.

From 2020, this money will be passed on through the Green Climate Fund, Global Environment Facility and other such agencies. But developing countries argue that promise has largely been unkept. A report by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) showed developed countries had made nearly $80bn available in 2018 as total climate finance. But it found that only 21% of that money was provided for adapting to climate impacts, while most went towards cutting carbon emissions.

Developing countries have criticised climate finance figures provided by developed world, pointing out they also include money from regular aid payments.

Some experts say adaptation plans have been hampered by politics.

“When you have other issues like [bad] governance, poverty and now Covid, it becomes very difficult for the plans to work. They simply aren’t a government’s priority,” according to Carlos Aguilar, a climate adaptation expert with Oxfam.

Cuba’s communist government has legalised small and medium-sized private businesses in the wake of mass anti-government protests last month.

Under the new rules, enterprises with up to 100 employees will be allowed.

President President Miguel Díaz-Canel said Cuba was taking firm steps to update its economic model.

Critics say the government’s plans have been accelerated because of July’s protests, when thousands turned out to complain of economic ruin.

Demonstrators condemned the handling of the coronavirus pandemic and demanded political change.

Dozens were arrested nationwide and that least one man died in the unrest.

Friday’s decision is seen as a major shift in government policy on the island, where state-run companies are the norm.

The protests came amid a severe economic crisis.

In July, the authorities said they would allow travellers arriving in the country to bring in food, medicine and other essentials without paying import duties.

Scrapping the import duties had been suggested by some Cubans as a way to ease the shortages of medicines and food.

Tourism, one of the most important sectors, has been devastated by global restrictions on travel during the pandemic.

Sugar, which is mostly exported, is another key earner for Cuba. But this year’s harvest has been much worse than expected.

As a result, the government’s reserves of foreign currency are depleted, meaning it cannot buy imported goods to supplement shortages, as it would normally do.

Cuba has blamed the US and its economic sanctions for the protests and Cuba’s wider problems.

BBC- Humanity’s damaging impact on the climate is a “statement of fact”, say UN scientists in a landmark study.

The report says that ongoing emissions of warming gases could also see a key temperature limit broken in just over a decade.

The authors also show that a rise in sea levels approaching 2m by the end of this century “cannot be ruled out”.

But there is new hope that deep cuts in emissions of greenhouse gases could stabilise rising temperatures.

This sober assessment from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) features in a 42-page document known as the Summary for Policymakers.

It leads a series of reports that will be published over coming months and is the first major review of the science of climate change since 2013. Its release comes less than three months before a key climate summit in Glasgow known as COP26.

“Today’s IPCC Working Group 1 Report is a code red for humanity,” said UN Secretary-General, António Guterres.

“If we combine forces now, we can avert climate catastrophe. But, as today’s report makes clear, there is no time for delay and no room for excuses. I count on government leaders and all stakeholders to ensure COP26 is a success.”

In strong, confident tones, the IPCC’s document says “it is unequivocal that human influence has warmed the atmosphere, oceans and land”.

According to Prof Ed Hawkins, from the University of Reading, UK, and one of the report’s authors, the scientists cannot be any clearer on this point.

“It is a statement of fact, we cannot be any more certain; it is unequivocal and indisputable that humans are warming the planet.”

Petteri Taalas, Secretary-General of the World Meteorological Organization, said: “By using sports terms, one could say the atmosphere has been exposed to doping, which means we have begun observing extremes more often than before.”

The authors say that since 1970, global surface temperatures have risen faster than in any other 50-year period over the past 2,000 years.

This warming is “already affecting many weather and climate extremes in every region across the globe”.

Whether it’s heatwaves like the ones recently experienced in Greece and western North America, or floods like those in Germany and China, “their attribution to human influence has strengthened” over the past decade.

The new report also makes clear that the warming we’ve experienced to date has made changes to many of our planetary support systems that are irreversible on timescales of centuries to millennia.

The oceans will continue to warm and become more acidic. Mountain and polar glaciers will continue melting for decades or centuries.

“The consequences will continue to get worse for every bit of warming,” said Prof Hawkins.

“And for many of these consequences, there’s no going back.”

When it comes to sea level rise, the scientists have modelled a likely range for different levels of emissions.

However, a rise of around 2m by the end of this century cannot be ruled out – and neither can a 5m rise by 2150.

Such outcomes, while unlikely, would threaten many millions more people in coastal areas with flooding by 2100.

One key aspect of the report is the expected rate of temperature rise and what it means for the safety of humanity.

Almost every nation on Earth signed up to the goals of the Paris climate agreement in 2015.

This pact aims to keep the rise in global temperatures well below 2C this century and to pursue efforts to keep it under 1.5C.

This new report says that under all the emissions scenarios considered by the scientists, both targets will be broken this century unless huge cuts in carbon take place.

The authors believe that 1.5C will be reached by 2040 in all scenarios. If emissions aren’t slashed in the next few years, this will happen even earlier.

This was predicted in the IPCC’s special report on 1.5C in 2018 and this new study now confirms it.

“We will hit one-and-a-half degrees in individual years much earlier. We already hit it in two months during the El Niño in 2016,” said Prof Malte Meinshausen, an IPCC author from the University of Melbourne in Australia.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is a UN body set up in 1988 to assess the science around climate change.

It provides governments with scientific information they can use to develop policies on global heating.

The first of its comprehensive Assessment Reports on climate change was released in 1992. The sixth in this series will be split into four volumes. The new report – from scientists on the IPCC’s Working Group 1 – is the first of these volumes to be released.

“The new report’s best estimate is the middle of 2034, but the uncertainty is huge and ranges between now and never.”

The consequences of going past 1.5C over a period of years would be unwelcome in a world that has already experienced a rapid uptick in extreme events with a temperature rise since pre-industrial times of 1.1C.

“We will see even more intense and more frequent heatwaves,” said Dr Friederike Otto, from the University of Oxford, UK, and one of the IPCC report’s authors.

“And we will also see an increase in heavy rainfall events on a global scale, and also increases in some types of droughts in some regions of the world.”

So what can be done?

While this report is more clear and confident about the downsides to warming, the scientists are more hopeful that if we can cut global emissions in half by 2030 and reach net zero by the middle of this century, we can halt and possibly reverse the rise in temperatures.

Reaching net zero involves reducing greenhouse gas emissions as much as possible using clean technology, then burying any remaining releases using carbon capture and storage, or absorbing them by planting trees.

“The thought before was that we could get increasing temperatures even after net zero,” said another co-author, Prof Piers Forster from the University of Leeds, UK.

“But we now expect nature to be kind to us and if we are able to achieve net zero, we hopefully won’t get any further temperature increase; and if we are able to achieve net zero greenhouse gases, we should eventually be able to reverse some of that temperature increase and get some cooling.”

While the future projections of warming are clearer than ever in this report, and many impacts simply cannot be avoided, the authors caution against fatalism.

“Lowering global warming really minimises the likelihood of hitting these tipping points,” said Dr Otto. “We are not doomed.”

A tipping point refers to when part of the Earth’s climate system undergoes an abrupt change in response to continued warming.

For political leaders, the report is another in a long line of wake-up calls, but since it comes so close to November’s COP26 global climate summit, it carries extra weight.

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